Valve may have issued a massive ban wave on Team Fortress 2 bots—but the issue still looms

Speculations have arisen that Valve has silently issued a massive ban wave against bots in its popular shooter, Team Fortress 2. While not confirmed by the company, one notable creator claims the Seattle-based developer culled nearly 20,000 bots in a single night, effectively wiping clean their presence in Casual matches.

A well-known Team Fortress 2 YouTuber shounic posted a video on June 27 claiming “all the bots got banned.” He said that on the evening of June 25, at least 16,000 bots were silently plucked from the game by Valve. The company hasn’t said a word regarding any ban waves or bot targeting, leaving the situation completely ambiguous, which is in line with the developer’s MO. Shounic further added that he explored the Casual game mode, where bots were mostly present, saying he found only a single bot after dozens of matches.

The creator substantiated these claims by going into live Casual mode games and asking the community whether they saw any bot activity in the last two days. Most of those who replied claimed they didn’t, which is strange in and of itself since bots have been a prevalent issue for years in Team Fortress 2. Despite previous attempts at fixing this problem, meeting one in every single Casual match was the norm, so seeing numerous players claiming they haven’t met a bot in days might indicate that something happened on June 25.

Valve still hasn’t confirmed these claims and likely never will. By hiding actual statistics and methods, Valve only helps itself as bot creators and hosters have a harder time figuring out how their services were rendered obsolete. The developer has had a similar approach to banning cheaters in CS2 and other games, so it wouldn’t be strange to see Valve behaving in such a way. If shounic’s claims that finding bots in TF2 is “genuinely impossible currently” are true, then the popular shooter might be getting a second chance at life.

Even so, the game is probably going to face the bot issue for a while longer until the company manages to completely isolate TF2 from bot activity.